In the end, we
self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little
miracles of self-reference.

”

— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange
Loop p.363

Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how
Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979
for general nonfiction, was received. In the preface to the
twentieth-anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that his book has
been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central
theme. He states: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is
that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a
self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a
stone or a puddle?"[1]

He sought to remedy this problem in I Am a Strange
Loop, by focusing on and expounding upon the central message
of Gödel, Escher, Bach. He seeks to demonstrate how the
properties of self-referential systems, demonstrated most
famously in Gödel's
Incompleteness Theorem, can be used to describe the unique
properties of minds.[2][3]

As an exploration of the concept of "self", Hofstadter explores
his own life, and those he has been close to.[4][5][6][7][8][9]